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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet. If anything, it's gotten better now that I don't need to log-in to scroll through someone's feed. Best change they've made in years, from where I'm standing.

But generally, yeah. I've heard a lot of people question Twitter's opex and headcount over the years, from HN to daily standup meetings. Twitter is a big company that ships a small handful of products, of which only Twitter for iOS and Twitter for Web really seems to matter. As long as they don't fire their sysops and iOS developers, most Twitter users would probably never notice a difference.

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> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

…except you know the entire company? The one that lost most of its only revenue source overnight [1], became immediately flooded with hate speech [2], lost a meaningful chunk of its most valuable users [3] and started attracting a huge amount of regulatory oversight knocking at the door [4].

[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2022/11/28/twitter-loses...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/02/technology/twitter-hate-s...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-where-did-tweet...

[4] https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/11/30/tech/twitter-eu-complianc...

And yet the website is still here. If you want to critique the new leadership, than do it by all means. The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though, and they've even managed to make a few changes I like. The point still stands - Twitter was operating way above it's means. If it actually requires 7500 engineers to keep running, then Twitter doesn't stand a chance anyways. Something tells me that's not the case, though...

Individually these are fatal mistakes. Collectively it’s clear… It’s over for Twitter under Musk.

They might be able to sell it to someone for a fraction of the price they have paid for it but every day that he stays in charge the less they will be able to sell it for.

Unfortunately there is not anyone dumber than Musk to whom he might sell the platform. That being said, even Musk isn't capable of destroying Twitter (at least yet). The site is still here, and all the profiles with their 280-character messages still load.

Trust me, I want Twitter to suffer the worst death of all. It's just not likely that Elon Musk will be the reason why the site falls, at least not from a technical standpoint.

You also seem to have a very narrow definition of what failure looks like as defined by HTTP status codes.

It’s already over… I don’t know how long the death rattle is going to last but it’s past the point of no return in any meaningful sense.

What metric would you use? Daily impressions? Those seem to be up. Posts? Also up. Impressions, posts, and status codes are the measure of success (status codes of course being a proxy for earnings as well as operations given that if they go out of business they won't be returning status codes at all).

Politely.. it’s very clear from this post that you don’t seem to have any background in anything business related.

None of those things are going to have any impact on the eventual outcome here.

I was pretty clear about the very specific problems they are facing and how any one of them individually is potentially fatal for them. Without solutions to those problems the end result is going to be the same it’s just the timeline that’s in question.

You’re just fantasizing. Twitter is fine. Thriving really.

How can you call a company that lives off ads and just lost its top ten advertisers "thriving"?

It's not hard to maintain a frozen codebase with a skeleton crew. This is practiced routinely at many organizations during end-of-year holidays when many people take PTO.

However, not many companies can survive with a permanent code-freeze, which is why companies don't just fire the "excess" folk who take PTO between December 25 and January 1, even though "things were fine" in that timeframe

Well muski boy probably fired many people that will be expensive to replace I heavily doubt most of developers in twitter work on its core functionality.

Many of them probably could be fired without much repercussions on company, the problem really is that there is no way in hell to judge that quickly and immediately start firing.

The core functionality can be replaced by a single, albeit particularly skilled, final year university student project.

It's the load balancing, the advertising, the billing system, the >200 legal jurisdiction's worth of regulation [0], lobbying both for and against various regulations, auditing everything for legal disputes, the dynamic battle with scammers and spammers who want to figure out and get around the spam filters, and the security updates (some of which they need to write themselves and not just install on all their machines).

Probably some other stuff as well, but this is already like a Monty Python sketch.

[0] not just each nation, but e.g. all the different US states

"I sold all my fire extinguishers, got rid of all my insurance, and got rid of the locks on my doors yesterday, and nothing has happened! This proves no one needs any of these things."

> Twitter was operating way above it’s means.

But for a one-time charge for a lawsuit settlement, it was profitable just before Musk took over, it was not operating above its means (it almost certainly is now, despite the cuts, because of the loss of advertising revenue on top of the enormous debt service costs Musk loaded it up with to finance the acquisition.)

> The actual employees seem to be doing a fine job at reduced-capacity though

Keeping the lights on in the core app? Maybe (subjectively, I’m seeing more problems with app behavior, and seeing more reports of them, but that could, at least in part, be more attention being on it.) With the kind of safety that is of concern to moderators, no, despite Musk’s claims of reduced hate speech and other objectionable content by Twitter’s count, outside analysis has that skyrocketing.

Basic business functions? Well, missing payroll in a couple of EU jurisdictions is kind of a big deal.

So, no, I would say the existing crew isn’t doing a great job of keeping Twitter running, though the most clear problems aren’t in app function, but other business-critical functions. But, it wasn’t just engineers that were cut, and keeping the lights on, without innovation, is probably the easiest function to maintain with deep cuts, since software doesn’t actually rot.

>Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

But a bunch of stuff did break. Famously 2FA stopped working, there has been an explosion of spam, and other widely reported issues- which are only the ones we know about - there could very well be some truely abhorrent stuff going under the hood to keep the wheels from falling off.

The idea that a week or two of something other than total violent collapse being a measure of how well you're handling staffing has got the smell of management track thinking all over it.

2 weeks is certainly nothing, I agree that the proof will be in the pudding. But so far, I remain unconvinced that Twitter is going to "break" in the traditional sense. If stuff goes down, we have protocol for bringing it back up. When 2FA dies, the process for recovering it is the same under Musk as it was under Dorsey.

We'll really just have to wait and see what happens. I really want Twitter to destroy itself beyond repair, but the core platform seems intact.

This isn’t entirely true fwiw. That assumes a constant load on the systems. If you start running into a capacity crunch on a given system, your best case is scale horizontally or vertically using established procedures. But if you hit a limit there (vertical scaling limit, architectural limit) and actually need to refactor? Good luck!

> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

This logic is just specious. Passing judgment on a large, distributed system based on its continued uptime is a bit like arguing that firing the flight crew of a jumbo jet was a good idea because the autopilot is working. It betrays a lack of understanding of what is really going on.

Or recognition that systems require ongoing work to delay and repair the inevitable entropy that grows within them.

The only system that does not require ongoing maintenance is one that no one uses.

Why is Elon asking them to stay late and be "hardcore" if there is nothing to do?

From article: "As soon as Musk actually took over, there were always three things that had to be done by yesterday." I wonder why...

I'd imagine that's because it's same way he ran his other companies.

And hell, hiring that many people at once is a lot of work to whoever left...

> nothing significant has broken yet

A large company is more than their website. Legal teams, regulatory compliance, infosec, etc. Apparently most of that is gone.

Most of their big advertisers have jumped ship as well, their revenue will have cratered. Of course as a private company they won't need to disclose by how much, but engineers can't be paid with likes and retweets.

> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

Apart from Twitter's ability to generate revenue.

That was broken when he bought it.

It wasn't – certainly not to the extent that he's destroyed it.

Twitter had profitable years but it wasn't really profitable...

And him firing a bunch of people wasn't why companies stopped paying him (why would they care?), it was every other thing he did with the platform.

I think there's a huge chasm between "management can't stop overspending beyond their decently high revenue" and "management is actively scaring away their revenue generators". I guess technically the former is "broken" but it's not broken in the same way the latter is.

I mean musky boi did show up that being the case. But it's not the firings that directly caused that, it's musk's starting to make sweeping changes from the get go and ones that drove the ad money away.

Twitter brought in $5bil in revenue in 2021. That doesn't sound broken. Whether they spent that money efficiently, and whether they could avoid FTC fines, is a different issue.

> That was broken when he bought it.

You know what, you're kinda right, he did load up Twitter with an interest burden of $1bil/year when he completed the purchase. And then he scared off all the advertisers. So sure, he broke it when he bought it.

> If anything, it's gotten better now that I don't need to log-in to scroll through someone's feed

This is what drove me to stop using Twitter and over to nitter as a frontend. If they finally stopped doing that, I can happily start browsing their actual website again.

> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

That's a pretty terrible take. Fire your entire IT staff and your stuff will all keep working for a while at most places. That doesn't make that IT staff pointless. They aren't hamsters that run on a wheel that powers everything, they are there to anticipate & correct problems as they come up.

You can't make this type of claim within a couple weeks of the layoffs. If Twitter continues to operate without a hiccup for the next year or two then sure try to make that claim. But to say it at this point is just ridiculous.

Also stuff already broke during the firings - like 2FA had issues already.

Wait you don’t get the login pop up anymore? I still get it constantly, makes twitter pretty much unusable when not logged in

I'm using Chromium on desktop Linux, I can scroll through recommended content and user profiles without getting the fullscreen login modal anymore. Maybe it's not rolled out to mobile yet?

BTW, I still get this, and it used to just make me go "oh well, I guess they don't want me to look at this web site" and close the window. But someone recently tipped me off to something I am embarrassed I never noticed before: if you actually click "login" on that popup and then cancel the next dialog, you can continue browsing un-pestered.

> Based on the fact that they've gone through several waves of layoffs and nothing significant has broken yet.

it hasn't been long enough to be able to say that yet. if you get rid of all firefighters, that doesn't mean the whole world will immediately catch fire.

>> nothing significant has broken yet.

Yet. That we know about. As the system trends towards entropy.

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